Troubleshooting Fibre Channel storage visibility

Fibre Channel has been around since 1994 and is probably one of the most widely used and most reliable storage transports available today. Fibre Channel is deployed in a shared storage scenario utilizing Fibre Channel switches to interconnect the storage array and our vSphere hosts. This allows for multiple physical paths between our storage systems and VM hosts.

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Fibre Channel connectivity issues are often a result of latency which will be discussed in Chapter 4, Troubleshooting Storage Contention; however, visibility and connection issues may stem from within our storage switch fabric as well.

Fibre Channel zoning is the process of partitioning a Fibre Channel fabric into smaller chunks to restrict connectivity, visibility, and add a level of security to your Fibre Channel network. Zoning in the Fibre Channel fabric is similar to a firewall except allowing selective presentation between hosts and the storage array. We would not want to allow...